Asustek computer PRIME B450M-K II ATX +2GLN+U3.2+M2 SATA6+4XDDR9

Being an Aberdonian, I'm happy to spend hours of my free time saving a few quid. Meaning, research. I want value for money. Meaning all the features, cheap, and futureproofing to boot. After all that, I end up buying /this/ board. Note: I was only looking for an mATX board (to fit my current case) and didn't consider any regular ATX boards.. This is everything I could want from series 5 Ryzen board. 32GB RAM in slot one (of four) is plenty for now, but no doubt double that will be standard a few years on. This board will still be viable. And by then, those 5000 series mega-chips (5950X, et al) will be cheaper and this board can handle them all. Built-in NVMe is FAF (gen 4). I installed Windows 11 in around three minutes to an SK Hynix Platinum P41 1TB M.2 in slot one. Read speeds from the M.2 are insanely fast. To give you an idea; the largest stable diffusion models (e.g. Deliberate V5) are loaded and running in under ONE second. This slot has no heatsink. I guess it's because they reckon you will want a custom heatsink for your primary drive. If you have a P41, you will *definitely* want one. I ended up with a SNOWMAN cooler, which works superbly (prevents throttling) and looks beautiful on this motherboard. The BIOS is complex (it thankfully defaults to simple view, though you can also have it default to advanced, which is handy when tweaking). Loads of stuff in there I haven't heard of (yet), but it was simple enough to overclock my CPU and RAM. Kingston Fury Beast 32GB DDR4 3200MHz happily runs at 34000Mhz with no effort on my part except selecting this in the BIOS . Not that I need overclocking now. Setup was effortless. I dropped in a stick of RAM (in slot B.2, as per the manual) and M.2 storage, slammed in my Windows 11 (£22 at SocialStack) flash drive and (around three) minutes later I'm running Windows. The board layout is logical enough. The components are of good quality (some /very/ good quality) and the whole board feels weighty and solid. It came with a backplate, SATA cable and a heap of stickers I'll never use, but hey, free stickers! Packaging was all cardboard, which we like. Also the BIOS update facility. Very nice. No CPU required; just insert the stick and press the button for three seconds. Clever stuff. I have six drives attached to this motherboard; two on USB 3, three on SATA and one (System drive) on the NVMe. As well as a USB 3 hub with multiple peripherals attached. No dropouts or errors anywhere. This board takes whatever you throw at it. Gaming is flawless. My eldest has tried a few of the latest titles (everything max - RTX 3060) and he's impressed. Jealous, even! After a week of trouble-free use, I'm impressed, too. I think this is a bargain and a great board on which to build your current (and future) Ryzen platform.

Bought this for my project of building a newer PC to replace my 12 year old desktop. Decided to switch to AMD so had to do a lot of research on which motherboard to select as there are a lot of motherboards out there at a range of prices and with a variety of different features. Chose the Asus TUF Gaming B650 plus wifi as it had good reviews in general and it has a lot of features. It has built in wifi, which was essential for me and this has performed really well. I haven't had any problems with the onboard wifi. The sound quality provided by the motherboard is crisp and clear. Could it be better, yes, but with the speakers I have and at this price you can't get much better. There are plenty of M.2 connections and they all have heat sinks to keep them cool and help them running correctly and not overheating. Also, there are numerous USB 3.2 connections available as well as Type-C so should be suitable for all. All-in-all this is a well built motherboard with a lot of features and is at a reasonable price now that AM5 boards have started dropping in price.

The motherboard was bought to replace an MSI B650m Mortar wifi that was broken (either it was the BIOS update or faulty memory controller that got it) The Asus TUF Gaming B650 Plus is a good replacement, I particularly like the extra slots of the atx board and the fan curve presets work well - for £165 it is good for the price at the time of purchasing. ***if you are having trouble installing the bluetooth and wireless network drivers, there are 2 different drivers on the Asus site for this board, one for Mediatek and one for Realtek, my board used the Mediatek drivers which was only visible when clicking on ‘see all’ on the page*** As for the add on software ‘Armoury Crate’ and ‘MyAsus’, I have found that these are not needed for my uses and actually used a fair amount of resources to run. The software was easy to use and lets me tweak overclocking settings, fan speed settings, RGB lights and can help with downloading and installing drivers - but I can change the settings from the BIOS (apart from the RGB settings) and you can find the drivers on the motherboard webpage. After uninstalling the both armoury crate and MyAsus, I found in services.msc that there were several Asus services that were still enabled (I suspect these relate to the MyAsus support app) so I disabled them as these were also taking resource, so keep an eye out for these if removing the software. I guess the Armoury crate software could be useful for a beginner in terms of installing drivers, but would suggest not keeping it installed due to the resource usage, and the software terms means they collect lots of data about the system, including games installed, hardware used, overclocking settings, screen resolution etc. which I think is a bit excessive just to change settings that are already available in the bios (not sure about the RGB settings as I didn’t need them) Compared to my old MSI board, the wireless hardware is a bit weaker, previously I was able to use bluetooth headphones with a wireless controller connected via the motherboard, however I was not able to do this with the Asus board and need to use the USB receiver for the controller. Once all the software was removed, the performance is good, the chipset, processor and memory is the same as my old MSI board so this was expected, however it is very nice to have a computer that boots correctly every time and in a few seconds rather than minutes!

Have been using this for about 3~ months now - Ryzen 7 9700x and 4x24gb Corsair DDR5 6000 RAM. It did have a slight stability issue (no doubt because of the 4 sticks of ram), which was immediately rectified by a BIOS update. Since then it's been totally reliable and performing as I'd expect. The promise of 6 fan headers is slightly misleading in that there are still only 4 PWM signals: 1 of the extra headers is simply full 12v, no control, and the other is a duplicate of the CPU fan header. Nonetheless it's useful to have extra headers and it did save me messing around with a splitter for the CPU cooler. I didn't really want too much RGB and this board doesn't have any built-in which is good. Though it does have headers for both 5v ARGB and 12v RGB lighting should I change my mind. Appearance wise it's smart in black and has plenty of heatsink surface for VRMs. Operation wise the only notable thing for me is that I've heard absolutely no coil-whine type noises from it, no buzzing etc. My previous board (Gigabyte AM4 itx) had a habit of buzzing even when idle. It wasn't too bad but as I keep a near silent PC most of the time it was a touch noticeable - this board is silent.

Great entry board also ddr4 rgb 5v plus 2x12v led strip lights for under desk behind monitors. Hdmi,vga and dvi sockets. Easy ro install as it comes with a disk. But remember to take of encryption on ssd in your old bios menu. Highly recommend if you don't want to go through the new ddr5 setup.

It's getting very hard to find a B550m (micro-atx) motherboard that properly handle the power requirements of the Ryzen 9 5950x. I would have ideally used the Gigabyte Aorus Pro-P which has 10+2 Phases Digital Twin Power Design with 50A DrMOS. The Asus TUF only has 8+2 DrMOS power stages so I was worried. But honestly I've had no problems with power delivery what-so-ever. From what I've researched, you should stay away from anything that has only 4 power stages (for obvoius reasons) unless you're running a Ryzen 7 5700g (60w TDP) and do your research before buying a board claiming 8 power stages because in reality they may actually only be 4 (a little dressed up). In a side by side comparison the ASUS TUF Gaming B550M-PLUS wins overall for better features , it's cheaper and still readily available. I paid £130 for mine while the Aorus Pro-P is a solid £160 (if you can find it). You can buy them for £200 imported from Japan (no thanks). Also, Gigabyte has discontinued it and I searched high and low for one locally then felt like I was buying something inferior getting this ASUS TUF board, but I was wrong. It has fantastic BIOS and they have it set up so you can modify the most fundamental power delivery features very easily. My only gripe is that it doesn't remember that you've set it to Advanced mode and always boots into Easy Mode. I have some really nice T-Force DDR4 Samsung B-Die memory which is 3600mhz CL14,15,15,38 and I set it to 14, 14, 14, 30 and it's running flawlessly. And also I occasionally touch the VRM heatsink to see if it's hot and sometimes when I'm running all cores it's a bit warm but it's ok. I also give a my memory a heat test and it's always cold. So overall I'm very happy! I totally recommend this for the VRM's as it's just about the last micro-atx B550m board you can find that can handle the Ryzen 9 5950x. The price here on Amazon fluxuates from £130 to £160. Check daily and grab one when the price is within your budget.

Why did you choose this product over others?: Was a good price at the time and had heard good things about previous TUF boards Ryzen Stability: Horrendous, constant software related issues, most of which are driver related due to Asus Armoury Crate either not allowing drivers to update or causing crashes itself. Even after uninstalling it somehow reappears eventually Motherboard quality: Board itself is well made and looks goo Value for money: Seemed like a good deal at the time, after 1.5 years of being annoyed by my son telling me it's started crashing again - I'd struggle to recommend even for half the price. Bought an MSI Tomahawk for my own PC about 6 months previous and not had a single issue with that.

Brought for my partner who built his PC and he mentioned the ease of use, once you know where bits go. Looks great and built with durability in mind.